The soon-to-be-released Sproutling baby monitor system aims to do a bit more than your average audio/video surveillance. It comes with an ankle monitor for the baby, a charger, and a mobile app. The anklet collects data like "heart rate, skin temperature, motion, and position," and apparently adjust to the individual baby's moods and napping habits informing parents about things like when they can expect their babies to wake up. If there are sudden changes in the data like higher or lower heart rate or temperature, or if the baby rolls over, the app sends parents an alert.

Various users like parents, grandparents, and/or babysitters can access the data on the app. Of course every parent wants the best for their baby, but so much data collection has raised questions about the security of their data and privacy. Via Washington Post:

Advertisement

While sending data about their baby's activities may stir some parents' concerns over privacy, the company said the data is anonymously collected with a signed permission from a parent. The data will be used by the company to produce analysis and improve the product.

People have been successfully raising babies for quite some time now, so is the constant influx of data all that necessary regardless of the security risk? While I am sure that the Sproutling system offers benefits like heart rate data, I can't imagine that it would be entirely life changing—that baby is still going to eat and sleep and poop and cry, and parents usually figure out when that all goes down.